


Things Unseen

by TheColorBlue



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Gen, Multiplicity/Plurality, posting this so I never have to think about it again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-10 01:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Booker DeWitt has a companion for back-up who isn't Elizabeth; maybe the Vigor called Possession should have had a familiar effect, but it hadn't; and other sundries.</p><p>Pertinent Link: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZR53ikSxE0">Cry Plays Bioshock Infinite</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Booker Dewitt had half-expected a familiar feeling the first time the Vigor “Possession” was used against him. In reality, it was a completely alien experience, as though an outside force were suddenly jerking him about. The sensation was clumsy and heavy-handed. Clyde’s presence was always felt as an internal force, and nearly natural. 

_Waddya I tell you,_ the voice called Clyde Michelson said, all sarcasm. _That priest was full of shit_.

By that time, Booker had thrown off the possession, and his attacker had taken a skyhook to the face. 

They looked at the carnage, all around them, in the square where the raffle should have been. In the distance was the sound of men shouting, pounding feet approaching. Booker’s breathed in and out, his whole body gone tight with the adrenaline. In his head, Clyde was _laughing_ , the psychotic son of a bitch. The spilling of blood always seemed to give him the giggles, and he begged Booker to give him a chance with the skyhook, but Booker brushed him off. Clyde was a crack shot, perfect for distance kills, but close range combat was a little beyond him. Sometimes he’d try to punch a fellow, and Booker would never understand how he managed _to miss_ …

 _Oh shit,_ Clyde said happily, spotting local law enforcement coming their way, and then Booker broke into a run. 

\--

Vigors were the weapon invented in Columbia, ostensibly, but Booker and Clyde never did figure out what, exactly, was their nature. Perhaps they were a form of advanced technology. Perhaps they were a form of black magic. The kinetoscope advertisements regarding the substances always seemed to paint them as a form of miracle—the kinds of abilities that you’d find from reading about angels, about the smiting of the wicked; or perhaps just the works of the devil. 

If there was a God…

If there were really things out there, Unseen…

\--

Booker never did get baptized, after the Battle of Wounded Knee, but at the age of twelve, some years prior, he _had_ seen a priest about an exorcism. 

The exercise had been among the stupidest he had ever put himself through.

And thus, never again. 

\--

When they arrived at the lighthouse in Maine, Clyde had kept up the usual stream of internal chatter. Even while the rain poured down, Clyde took the time to briefly investigate everything. It was Clyde’s fault, really, that Booker so often looked like a nitwit who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. 

Clyde rummaged through boxes, bins, other people’s belongings. He pocketed change when he found it. Back in the city, he’d stolen fruit, all the time, and would present it to Booker like a cat demanding some kind of appreciation for the spoils found. 

At the door of the lighthouse, Clyde surveyed the sign on the door.

Booker read out aloud: “Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt—this is your last chance—“

Clyde looked at the smears of red across the bottom, and remarked, “Huh. Bit of a juice spill.” 

If Clyde had been a kid outside of Booker’s own mind, he would have cuffed him then. Instead, he ignored the added remark and opened the door. 

\--

Clyde had said once: he had been born in Chicago, in the year 1835. That was two years after the city was founded. His parents had been farmers, during a period when the area was still being developed for trade and commerce. 

Despite the strangeness of his story, Clyde insisted: he was twenty-three-years-old. 

Actually: he had been twenty-three for a very long time. 

Booker had met Clyde for the first time when Booker was seven, and even then Clyde had called himself twenty-three, among other things. Back then, it had been even stranger. He’d been like an older brother that Booker would have had, if his own siblings hadn’t all died at young ages, and also if Clyde hadn’t been _inside his mind_.

Honestly though, it wasn’t something you really talked about: becoming aware of something like another presence inside your head. 

Even Booker DeWitt could have seen that kind of trouble running from a mile off. 

\--

Clyde had not regarded Anna as his daughter. In a strange way, this made sense. For a few years there, Booker had not heard that voice in his head, chattering away, or making an occasional play with a hand of cards in a game. Booker would sometimes wonder if it was the alcohol that had done it, all those years spent at the bottom of a bottle. Maybe he’d drowned Clyde out with the alcohol, and his own misery, and when he’d struggled to finally climb back out of the pit again, Clyde had returned. 

When Clyde came back, he listened to the story, about the loss of Anna, and he did not say, _you goddamn son of a bitch_ , but Booker could have imagined it anyway.

He had been calling himself the same for far too long now. 

God fucking damn _everything._

\--

That had be a long time ago. In 1912, they were on the run in Columbia, and when they saw the men approaching from below, Booker hunkered down and let Clyde take the rifle. 

Clyde swiftly, carefully took aim, and hit them square in the skull each time.

One. 

Two.

Three.

“Fuckers,” his hissed out slowly, letting out the breath like letting out the tension in their shoulders. He flexed their left hand a little as he set down the rifle, the Vigor painting strange lights across the skin like the most horrible hallucinations. 

They did not look down at their hand. Instead, Booker looked up towards the sky, and the skylines. 

Skywards it was, then. 

\--

 _Do you think it’s funny,_ Clyde asked, as they wandered through the laboratories of Monument Island, _that they think you’re a false shepherd, and here you are, talking to that fella inside your brain, for all you know I could very well be fucking Satan in a handbasket--_

 _Hilarious_ , Booker muttered back. _Just hilarious_. 

Clyde inspected the glass bell jar displays. 

“What the fuck is a menarche?” he asked.

Booker chose to ignore that one. 

They wandered on, careful not to tread on broken glass and live wires. 

\--

Talking about Clyde to Ellie—to _Elizabeth_ \--hadn’t exactly been on Booker’s to-do list. It rarely was, and Clyde was pretty much accustomed to that. They walked together through Battleship Cove and the pier, and Clyde restrained himself from making grabbing hands at sugar floss carts, or to join Ellie-- _Elizabeth_ , in dancing on the docks. 

Even Booker had to admit that Columbia was a wonder, despite the horrors hidden just underneath, but goddamn it if it wasn’t a distraction from the job, leading around both a twenty-year-old girl and a twenty-three-year-old kid lurking just inside his own skin. 

The last straw, though, nearly, was when Clyde started expressing casual attraction towards Ell—Elizabeth, goddamnit! and making some kind of half-joking remark about body massages. 

_No,_ Booker snapped. _Not now, not ever, we finish this job, and you,_ you _are not going to humiliate me in front of this girl._

Clyde merely laughed a little, and then said, _I suppose I’m just lucky I’m handy with a rifle, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to stand me at all, wouldya, Mistah DeWitt?_

Booker simply sighed, like the emotionally constipated man that he was, and simply told him to keep an eye on Elizabeth until they had all managed to get away from Columbia safely.


	2. Misc. Notes

Okay, okay, so I should probably explain myself:

-Watching [Cry Plays Bioshock Infinite](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZR53ikSxE0) was interesting to me because although we are basically getting all of this game playthrough from Cry's perspective (the camera moves where he wants to see, we get all the actions of the players coming through as though he's "there"), we also have the interesting element of Booker also being his own character; for me, I was then getting two overlapping narratives, one of Cry's experience of these scenarios, and two being Booker's. And then there was an odd moment, I still can't remember where exactly, wherein we get: something like, Booker asking to the effect of "what the hell are we going to do now" and Cry shouting back "heck if I know." 

You can probably guess what happened after that. 

-I want to emphasize that Clyde was _inspired_ by Cry's commentary as audio performance, rather than intended as any kind of interpretation of Cry himself. I don't even know anything about the guy, but his Bioshock Infinite commentary sure is entertaining. The line about [spilled juice](http://youtu.be/OZR53ikSxE0?t=3m23s) is his, as is the thing about [massages](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo2pSqlxuGg). And a bunch of other nods to his remarks and mannerisms, too lazy though to try linking everything. 

-for newcomers to my interests, I don't even feel like explaining it, but for further "explanations," you can check out the multiplicity/plurality tag as used in my body of fic as a whole, and that might clear up any additional questions about why "Booker and Clyde."


End file.
